Git Global

Git Global, for the 2023 Open Source Hackfest
READMEs of the MLH repositories fetched by Git Global

Inspiration 🧠

Open-source hackers, coders, and programmers form a community that spans the whole inhabited world. That's over 200 countries, countless ethnicities, and more than 7000 languages. Yet, a large portion of open-source code is documented and explained only in the dominant language of the computer science world: English. Moreover, Github does not provide multilingual search capabilities on their popular source code platform.

This imposes an extraordinary burden on technical creatives engaged in work that could benefit the world. Git Global bridges the gap and allows them to benefit from the world's work.

Open Source and Documentation 📖

Git Global is a complete open source project with extensive documentation. Check out the README for notes on licensing, the Contributing Guidelines and the Code of Conduct.

Markdown files describing the function of all methods in scraper.py and main.py are found in the doc folder.

What it does 🔧

Enter the Github username of an organization or developer into Git Global to see a list of all the READMEs in their public Github repos translated into your native tongue. Search for keywords in your preferred language using Git Global's multilingual search functionality.

How we built it 💻

Git Global is built on Streamlit (yay!), with calls to the Google Cloud Translation API for natural language translation.

Challenges we ran into ❌

One challenge we ran into was parsing the HTML of user vs. organization Github pages. We started with the organization angle, and then tried to input individual developer tags into the parsing functions. When confronted by a bevy of errors, we had to regroup and reassess how we were to approach building a parser for both user and organization Github pages.

Another challenge was getting the Google Cloud backend set up. This was our first time using the Cloud Translation API; the documentation -- combined with some trial and error -- solved all our problems on that front.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 💪🏾

Building a stateful application in Streamlit was a new experience for us. We had to change the way we thought about the user's control flow within the application. We sketched out a quick state diagram to make these transitions more concrete and to handle edge cases with more fidelity.

What we learned 📈

We learned how to use st.session_state and st.secrets in Streamlit to maintain state and to securely access secrets inside a Streamlit Community Cloud deployment.

We also learned how to build with Google Cloud, setting up API keys and authentication for the necessary requests.

What's next for Git Global 🔜

Git Global is committed to enhancing accessibility for all developers, regardless of where they come from. The next step for Git Global is to build out a Chrome extension with the core functionality and parsers of the current iteration!